


not the kind of girl you'd take home

by zauberer_sirin



Series: if it makes you happy, it can't be that bad [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Coulson is a foodie, Don't Touch Lola, F/M, POV Phil Coulson, Pre-Relationship, Skye has trust issues, Skye is a criminal, Skye is not an innocent little girl, Unresolved Sexual Tension, cranky!Coulson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-14
Updated: 2014-04-14
Packaged: 2018-01-19 10:10:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1465519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Coulson never forgets Skye has a past. He shouldn't be suprised to receive this particular call.</i>
</p>
<p>Or, the one where Coulson bails Skye out and feelings happen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	not the kind of girl you'd take home

**Author's Note:**

> This was meant to be a fun and light little fic but of course me being me it turned into something serious and angsty and Skye-centric and part of a 4-fanfic saga with like themes and stuff. I apologize.
> 
> Titles from Sheryl Crow.

  


  


Sometimes, if he looks at her in the right light, she does look like a common criminal.

And right now, well, picking up her things from the desk of the county jail, one could argue that's exactly what Skye is.

She gives Coulson a shy, mortified wave from across the room which Coulson refuses to acknowledge. He's been driving for four hours, he's cranky and hungry and bailing Skye out of a Georgia jail is not something he'd thought he'd be doing this particular afternoon.

"Why didn't you show them your badge?" he asks – SHIELD is no good currency these days but a small town like this, it would probably work.

"I didn't have it on me, in case I was caught while on the mission. And for some reason they didn't believe me when I told them I was part of a governmental agency."

He signs the releases papers, the money already paid. The problem hadn't been that she was driving without a valid license – the problem was that she had failed to heed the court summons from the last time this had happened. From the last two times this had happened. In her _before_ life; before she was Skye of SHIELD, she had been this. And she had been careless.

She's tilting her head to look at Coulson, examine his features under agressive fluorescent lights and his exasperation.

"You're going to keep your judgy face on for the rest of the night?" she asks him.

"What were you thinking?"

"I wasn't thinking," she admits, adjusting the strap of her bag and feeling for the laptop inside. "I was focused on the mission. I forgot this was the state where I had a warrant. It was a long time ago, like 2011."

She's trying to make it light, maybe make him smile a bit. Underneath that Coulson can see she is a bit embarrassed after all. From what she told him on the phone she had already finished the job by the time the cops pulled her over. She lets out a little sigh, seeing his lack of reaction, the lightness is almost gone: "Look, if you tell me that you didn't think there was an arrest warrant with my name on it out there... well, I know you'd be lying."

"Probably."

In hindsight Coulson doesn't know why he was so surprised to receive the call.

"Where's the Bus?"

He shakes his head. "The team has some stuff to do meanwhile."

"Don't tell me I made you come here in the middle of a mission."

"Not a mission. Reconstruction."

Reconstruction is the code word they use these days for the thousand menial and insignificant (but not really) jobs they have to do because SHIELD fell down. Mostly it's just transporting dangerous objects (sometimes people) to a safe place, shifting the whole contents of the Sandbox to other agencies, like the NSA or the CIA. It's not ideal – but for now it's all they can do, until the SHIELD scraps can build enough of an infrastructure of their own.

"Still," Skye says, walking out of the sheriff's office with him. "If you were busy."

"I couldn't very well leave one of my agents to rot in a dark cell," he says, and it comes out with a lot more edge and bite than he means, and even Skye –who wouldn't normally shut up at something like that– has no reply for it.

He really is cranky.

 

 

\+ + +

 

 

They try to get her car from the pound but it's already closed. Skye eyes the fence suspiciously.

"I could hop over and –"

"You're gonna top up your recent crime with a new one?" Coulson asks.

She has her fingers curled into the fence wire, and it's the right kind of grip and Coulson realizes she probably knows how to do this, wasn't bluffing at all.

She frowns, considering it for a moment. "Maybe not. Sorry. Habit."

"I don't think I want to know."

"That was a rental," she protests, her trusted black boots kicking some dirt into the air.

"With your inclination towards crime I'd have thought you'd come prepared with a fake license. A better one."

"I told you, I didn't have much time. I used the one ID I always use for this stuff. And I didn't think I would get pulled over, I wasn't going that fast," she tells him, impatient. She's cranky, too. But he guesses that's what six hours freezing your ass in a cell does to you. His annoyance at her fades a bit when he thinks about that. She's fidgety. "I'm starving."

"Why don't I send someone to get your things and return the car tomorrow and I drive us both back to the Bus, I'll tell May to meet us halfway." She nods. A beat, and Coulson can't help himself: "We can get something to eat before."

She smiles brightly –and tired, but not irritated at all, not anymore– at him.

"Thanks, boss."

 

 

\+ + +

 

 

There's no restaurant that looks decent enough around these parts (Skye is no help at all, with her own admission of having lived on vending machines for the past few days) but there are some appealing trucks near a parking lot – actually, Coulson got into the whole food truck frenzy way before it became fashionable, and he's really fond of telling people this, so he ends up telling her as well – so they buy something and sit on the car to eat. There's a gigant car wash across the street. It's Friday.

Skye's a classic, going for the basic greasy burger instead of something a bit more adventurous like Coulson. (He thinks she might tease him for that, but she doesn't)

"Never in a million years I'd have thought you'd allow food in Lola, I'm _shocked_ , and a bit disappointed," she says, obviously delighted. The top is down so he doesn't have to worry about the smell – still, he gets why she finds it odd. But he's also not the stuck-up robot many people believe him to be.

"As long as you don't spill your soda, we're okay."

He didn't mean to sound so much like a strict father. He's kind of horrified he does. Skye cracks the faintest of smiles and places a lot of napkins on her lap, to reassure him of her good intentions.

"Is yours any good?" she inquires of his sour pork wrap, leaning over a bit.

Coulson takes his food away from under her inspection. "Hey. You made your choice. I don't share."

"You don't say," she chuckles.

It's a little later in the evening than he had meant; Skye is massaging the back of her neck with one hand, balancing food and drink with the other. Her clothes look a bit too thin for the weather, Coulson wants to ask if she is cold but he doesn't, he's done enough of that concerned-father act for one day, doesn't ever want to go there.

From the parking lot they can hear the cacophony of overlapping stereo music coming from the competing trucks.

"You want to tell me why you were driving without a license?" he finally asks.

She lifts her shoulders a bit. "It's simple: I never actually got one. Not a real one, anyway. I didn't have a good fake at the time and I got busted. It's pretty straightforward."

"And you want to tell me why you don't have a _real_ license?"

She arches one challenging eyebrow, like saying _not really_. There are bits in Skye's story that are like dark rooms, places she intently refuses to illuminate. Coulson could do the guesswork, but he admits he is a bit scared to. It's easy to forget, what she comes from – she might look like the kid, the team's rookie, but her eyes tell a different story. He doesn't ever forget, but sometimes he pretends to.

He doesn't quite understand. He's seen her driver's license. A name which is not exactly hers, but he had supposed the thing itself was solid.

"I don't understand," he says. "I've seen you drive."

"I know how to, obviously. I just –"

"What?"

She bites her lower lip. "Nothing."

"Skye."

"Why get the real thing when I could just as easily fake it? That's all. I gave it a try. Failed the test once, never felt like taking it again."

There's more to that, of course. Coulson has learned that, if he waits it out, Skye normally surrenders the information of her own will. If he pretends he's not interested in pushing sooner or later she'll slip up, feigning it was her idea all along, because that way she can do it casually – like: _ever told you about that time I slept in a launderette for two weeks?_ and that kind of thing.

"The license," she says. "I know it's a milestone. A rite of passage for people my age. But I skipped so many of those that I figured, one more didn't matter. I guess that was the idea."

That's more like it.

She tries to make it sound light but Coulson can tell there's some residual regret here. There's always some regret around the edges of her anecdotes. It makes him wonder if Agent Avery had been right after all, if the cost of keeping Skye safe hadn't been too high.

She finishes her fries and folds the dirty wrapper on itself.

"I can't believe I haven't said this earlier," she says, eyes fixed on her drink, "but I'm really sorry you had to come all the way out here just to get me. I know how stressed you've been lately."

"I'm not the only one stressed. The whole reason why you're out here is because you were on a mission, _alone_."

He feels bad enough about it – but they are not abundant in resources these days and this was something Skye could do on her own. Correction: it was something she could do even better on her own. And after all that's happened – even if her official SHIELD career lasted less than a day – she is the one insisting on having more responsibilities.

"At least that wasn't a total waste of time," she says.

Skye had managed to trace some of the lab equipment purchases HYDRA-associated companies have made in the last few months –cutting HYDRA's supply of, well, everything, is a top priority right now. It's not a glamorous job but it is effective– and Skye has the peculiar advantage of being just as skillful mining information from a mark as from behind her computer.

She once told Coulson that her trick to get marks to believe her is that her cover might be a fake but the details were always, always true. If, when on a mission, Skye says " _I like strawberry ice cream_ " is because she herself likes strawberry ice cream, not because it's part of her undercover persona – you are trying to build a person, not a story, she told him. You don't have to start from scratch. The truth always sounds like the truth, and that's a good tool.

They've been in constant contact, and the job wasn't dangerous but Coulson realizes this is the first time he sees her in over a week.

"If it makes you feel any better, despite assumptions you might have made about me, this was the first time I've actually been in jail," she tells him. She takes a sip of her soda. "I thought it'd be scarier. It was a bit boring."

Coulson thinks: if she had ever been in jail before she would have just scratched it from her record, just like everything else.

"Well. Funnily enough I've never done that," Coulson says. "Bail someone out, the traditional way." The traditional way: post bail, no backchannel diplomacy, no good old SHIELD intimidation.

"No? I've done it for girlfriends. And – and for Miles. Small stuff, couple of hundreds at most. It's kind of fun. You should think about it as life experience."

Yes, Coulson thinks, I should. For all that he has more than two decades on the girl Skye can still take him to school in a lot of areas.

"Why did you call me?" he asks her. Perhaps he shouldn't, since he knows the answer, but part of him wants to hear it. 

Her reply is simple: "Who else was I going to call?"

"I don't know. Simmons. Fitz. Someone who didn't pull a _judgy face_."

"I don't mind the face," she says, a tiny smile darting over her lips. "Come on, be serious. You're on top of every list, Coulson. Number one to bail me out, emergency contact, the one to make the medical decisions. By the way _you_ get to keep my van if something ever happens to me so, you know, take care of her as if it were Lola."

" _Skye_..."

"It's okay. I'm not being morbid. I just had to do some, scratch that, a lot, of paperwork when you tried to promote me to proper SHIELD agent. Insurance stuff. My last will and all that. And well, I sort of had to pick you. I don't have anyone else, not really."

She looks away.

She doesn't look like a criminal at all, not in this light.

She doesn't look like the lost kid some people assume she is.

The truth lies some place in the complicated in-between. The truth is: in this light she doesn't look like anything other than just Skye.

 

 

\+ + +

 

 

They've been driving for a couple of hours and not saying much to each other. Coulson would prefer perhaps if she fell asleep. It's a bit uncomfortable like this. He's normally so relaxed at the wheel, specially with Lola, specially driving at night. It's the kind of thing he enjoys. Skye's presence alters the picture, and the change unnerves him.

At least she's looking out of the window, into complete darkness and the occasional roadside house with tiny porch lights on, seemingly lost in thought, like she has forgotten Coulson is even here.

He watches her from the corner of his eye, serious and small and removed from everything and everyone. She looks almost in her element – a girl on a fast car leaving town.

"I would call you," Coulson says, quietly, far beyond the point where she expects for them to have a conversation. Not sure why he said it but it just occurs to him that it might even be true. Absurd, he knows, but here they are.

She turns to him, startled, probably thinking she's heard wrong. " _What_?"

"If I were stuck in jail and I needed someone to bail me out. You'd be my one phone call."

Her shoulders tense but her lips curl upwards, par for course Skye behavior when faced with his compliments. At least he thinks it was a compliment – maybe it was something completely different.

She turns the idea in her palm, grins an intimate grin Coulson knows well. "I hope you are not counting on my meager funds to pay for bail, sir, because, _good luck_. But it's a nice thing to say. You'd be better off calling Simmons, though, her parents are loaded."

"Tell you what we're going to do," he says, something almost playful clinging to his voice. "I'll phone you and you get the money from Jemma."

Skye chuckles. "That works, too."

He doesn't feel cranky anymore.


End file.
